Donald Trump’s declaration that he was going to build a “great, great wall” at the southern border and that Mexico was going to pay for it, a pledge he repeated hundreds of times, was one of his most easily debunked 2016 campaign-trail whoppers. His Administration struggled to construct about fifty miles of new barrier, at a cost of billions of dollars to U.S. taxpayers, which some migrants managed to scale with handmade wooden ladders. But that didn’t stop Greg Abbott, the two-term governor of Texas, who is seeking reëlection next year, from vowing last month to build a wall of his own. Texas, he said, would contribute two hundred and fifty million dollars from the public treasury and use crowdfunding to help pay for the rest. The idea is as illogical and unaffordable as ever, but Abbott isn’t as interested in building a wall as he is in constructing a winning campaign message.
This past week, Trump joined Abbott on a trip to the Rio Grande Valley, where they were briefed by law-enforcement leaders and visited a section of the border with Mexico, before joining Fox News’ Sean Hannity for an interview in front of an energized crowd. At one point, Trump claimed that, had his plans not been thwarted by Democrats, the wall could have been completed “in a couple of months.” “We were just about finished,” he said. Abbott, who is facing at least one Republican opponent to his right in next year’s primary for governor, sees little downside to declaring his fealty to Trump. He called the former President “a great friend of mine,” and said that securing the border was “a job that you did, but a job the Biden Administration is completely failing us on.”
Emboldened by the unexpectedly strong showing by the Texas G.O.P. in the November elections, Abbott and his allies in the Republican-dominated statehouse turned this year’s biennial legislative session into a conservative dreamscape. They passed a slate of hard-line measures that included a law prohibiting abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, with no exceptions for rape or incest, and empowering private citizens to sue anyone they believe may have helped a person avoid the ban. Another new law allows most Texas residents to carry a handgun without a permit—never mind that, according to a Quinnipiac poll released in late June, seventy-four per cent of Texans said that they opposed the idea of carrying a handgun without a license or training. (In the same poll, only thirty-nine per cent of respondents said that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.) And there is the law that bans schools from requiring “an understanding of The 1619 Project,” produced by the Times. According to the law, due to take effect on September 1st, teachers may not tell students that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States.”
One piece of unfinished business is Abbott’s determination to pass restrictions that will make it harder for some reliably Democratic voters to cast ballots. The proposed measures, some of the strictest in the country, would limit early-voting hours, make it more difficult to vote by mail, and allow a judge to overturn a result based on a challenger’s unsubstantiated assertion that fraudulent votes changed the outcome. On May 30th, Democrats slipped out of the House chamber to deny the Republican leadership the quorum required to pass the new rules, which the G.O.P. has presented as a matter of “election integrity.” (According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released in May, sixty-one per cent of Republicans still believe that the election was stolen from Trump, despite the fact that more than fifty lawsuits have been thrown out and Trump’s own Administration dismissed the claim.) The Democrats’ victory will be short-lived, however, should Abbott, as expected, push the measures through a special session scheduled to begin on Tuesday. The anticipated law, according to James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, will put Democrats “at a significant disadvantage.”
Abbott is accustomed to being an anti-Democratic combatant. As the state attorney general, he sued the Obama Administration more than two dozen times, targeting the Affordable Care Act, the Voting Rights Act, and environmental regulations designed to limit climate change. He entertained audiences by telling them, “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and I go home.” He tacked modestly toward the middle two years ago, after Democrats flipped twelve seats in the Texas House, two in the State Senate, two in Congress, and gave Senator Ted Cruz a scare. But, in the decisive 2020 results, Abbott saw a distinctly red future.
Abbott’s own favorability ratings are mixed, with only forty-four per cent of Texans approving of his performance, according to a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll last month. He endured a rough spot earlier this year, when a winter storm knocked out power to large parts of the state. After thermal power plants powered by natural gas froze, the state’s passion for deregulation, and a determination to operate independently, left its utilities without a backup plan. For days, Texans shivered and went without water. Many electricity customers, whose contracts were tied to fluctuating wholesale prices, saw astronomical spikes in their bills. Abbott tried to shift blame, falsely implicating wind turbines and saying that the calamity “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.” As Abbott and Trump made the rounds this past week, Vicente Gonzalez, a Democratic congressman whose district encompasses the border city of McAllen, reminded voters of the power grid’s collapse. “Wasting taxpayer dollars to promote the construction of a border wall, instead of correcting the failed power grid,” he said, “is bad leadership that is further putting Texans’ lives at risk.”
There is no denying that Biden is facing trouble on the border. In May, U.S. Customs and Border Protection took a hundred and eighty thousand people into custody along the Mexico border. Nearly forty per cent of the stops involved individuals who had been stopped at least once in the previous twelve months, the agency reported. Abbott is not the only Republican governor using the situation to project toughness. This past week, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor and a prospective Presidential candidate, made a show of sending fifty law officers to Texas to help out. Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, followed with an announcement that she was sending up to fifty National Guard members to the southern border on a mission underwritten by a private donor. The governors of Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas said that they, too, would send personnel. On Hannity’s show, Abbott said that what’s happening at the border is nothing less than “the erosion of the social fabric of the United States of America.”
Trump, who spoke at each of three events with Abbott during his border visit, pinballed between praise for Texas sheriffs and the state G.O.P. leadership and a familiar litany of complaints and boasts, many only loosely connected with reality. He lit into Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, who fled Somalia with her family when she was eight. “How’s her country doing, by the way? And they’re telling us how to run our country right now.” Trump also bragged that he bragged that he had won Texas last year “in a landslide.” (In fact, Trump’s margin of victory—5.6 per cent—was smaller than that of any winner since Bob Dole, in 1996, and more than three points narrower than in 2016.) “They were saying, ‘Well, Texas, is going to be close.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m in favor of oil, I’m in favor of God, and I’m in favor of guns. And they’re not.’ ”
Mustafa Tameez, a Democratic strategist in Houston, sees Abbott as a “mini-Trump.” “He’s given up on the middle,” Tameez said. “He’s given up on moderation and any idea of what used to be the big-tent G.O.P.” If Democrats, who have what Tameez called a “bad brand” in Texas, hope to flip the state, they must continue to find ways to appeal to independents and suburban moderates. “The kinds of things that Abbott is doing,” Tameez told me, “are really losing those independent voters.” Abbott seems to be wagering that if he rallies the Republican base while making it harder for Democrats to turn out their voters, he can withstand any losses he might suffer among moderates. It doesn’t help that Democrats are still searching for a gubernatorial candidate. As Henson, at the University of Texas, said, Abbott and the Republican legislators are operating in “an environment where they don’t perceive a lot of threats.” Craig Murphy, a Republican strategist who has worked with Abbott, told me, “He’s going to win his primary easily, and he’s going to win the general election easily. I’ve taken polls recently and I’ve seen it.”
